My dorm is WAY nicer than I need, but that is a wonderful problem to have I think (except maybe the money part of it). I’m in Raney House at OSU, and my roommates are super nice. They’re all sophomores who already know each other, which was super intimidating, but we’re getting along quite well. We went to see Madagascar at a drive-in last night!!

I am not feeling homesick yet, which is and isn’t surprising. On one hand, living in my home is like living in a dirty frat house, so there’s not a ton to miss. On the other hand, we have 0 welcome week activities like we normally do, so there is a lot less to distract from anything I would possibly miss. I do miss a couple of friends so deeply that my heart feels heavy when I think about it, but overall I am still holding up perfectly okay.

I have very little hope that we’re gonna get to stay on campus for long, which makes all of the moving in and unpacking feel a little pointless. Apparently, if our school’s positive test rate surpasses that of the county’s, it’s an automatic send-home for all of us. This just feels inevitable considering how some students here really aren’t taking this seriously at all. I feel lucky that my roommates are at least, but just walking around or scrolling through social media, it is very apparent that COVID is about to spread like wildfire around here. I really hope that I do not get sick, but I suppose that’s the risk I decided to take in moving here.

Another thing that’s felt a little strange to me is the new precautions I have to take just going outside. No more walking alone at night, I own pepper spray now, trying to be with other people as much as possible. I’ve heard many stories of rape and theft occurring in the past couple weeks amongst other crimes, but I haven’t witnessed anything firsthand. I am confident I’ll be able to stay safe, but all these new precautions are definitely something new to me after living in West County for the past four years.

That’s most of the news I can think to write about for now, but I’m sure there will be more to come soon.

It’s been a hot minute since I’ve last opened up WordPress. I logged on a little over a month ago to switch my email from my Rockwood account to my personal, and I just caught up on all of Durham’s posts through the entire pandemic so far. Here are some updates from me. 🙂

Graduation ended up feeling pleasantly normal despite the drive-in circumstances of it, although social distancing was not enforced or practiced at all for us graduates. We all clustered together walking back into the mall at the end of the ceremony, almost no one wearing their masks. It felt inevitable to me that people were going to get sick, but I heard nothing of the sort in the weeks to follow. Although, many MHS students and alumni seem to have contracted it at this point, which is a bad sign for the coming school year. I have been very careful, but I still fear contracting and spreading the virus, and it again feels unavoidable in the long run.

Ohio State originally announced that we would be having in-person classes, but my schedule is already mostly online. Even if it was mostly in person, I don’t imagine things would feel “back-to-normal,” if that’s something we’ll ever approach. It sounds like most clubs and organizations are functioning mostly, if not entirely, online for at least the first semester, but somehow they are also talking about having a close-to-regular football season with reduced audiences. I would be very surprised if that stayed the case. Even our dining options are reduced, and it sounds like they’re overall trying to keep things mostly to our dorms, which doesn’t sound like a great first semester socially (or like I’m getting my money’s worth of paying room and board). Despite OSU being a huge party school, I’m not a huge partier and definitely didn’t pick going there because of that social aspect. But, I have a hunch that the bulk of opportunity for in-person socialization will be parties, since those are the only events that the school doesn’t really get a say in. I do not plan on attending any of these, as most of the people who get the virus seem to have done so at parties or other nonessential, big social events that they were ignorant/selfish to be attending in the first place. They have also already established that we have no fall break, and classes up through the day before Thanksgiving. After we come home for Thanksgiving, we have one last week of classes along with finals week online, so coming home for Thanksgiving is now also coming home for the rest of the year. I don’t mind this, as I imagine all schools will have to go virtual from at least Thanksgiving on anyway, so I’m glad they planned ahead to get as much on-campus time as possible. My personal bet is that we’ll be sent home by October though, if we even make it that far. I even considered a gap year because I am so confident that we won’t get to have even close to a full college experience. But, I’ve landed on the idea that either I pay R&B and have a modified first semester on campus, or we get sent home and I get a good refund out of it. If I had more time to decide and draw up possible plans for a gap year, I would have considered it more, but I feel like if I jumped into it with next to no plan, it would ultimately end up as time wasted.

One more thing I’ve learned while getting ready for college: I am broke as hell! My parents are terrible with money, and I was informed just a year or two ago that I had no savings account in my name like I had been previously told, and that I would be receiving no help from them with covering college costs. Bold statement for people with a 6 figure income who tell me they want me to become a doctor (that’s supposed to be humorous with a tinge of bitterness, but while rereading I’ve noticed that it could come off as just bitchy). Anywho, I was decently stressed about this, but very excited to receive a scholarship covering full tuition(around 33,000 dollars a year)! I knew room and board was around 12-13 grand a year, so I felt like that was a relatively small amount of debt to take on for an out-of-state, large institution. Looking deeper into things, I learned that there’s a such thing as “Other Educational Costs” amounting to an additional 4 grand per year, which seems like total bullshit to me. I am trying to be okay with it since I cannot do anything about it. I’m trying to save money in little ways too, like finding the cheapest textbooks I can and picking the cheapest dining plan.

Recently, I’ve started listening to some new music! A weird combo: some Radiohead, some One Direction (I didn’t let myself like them when everyone else did in middle school, so I’m giving them a fair shot now), and lots of 80’s stuff. I’ve listened to 80’s before, so it’s not exactly new, but I’ve had a new appreciation for it. Thinking about how much music evolved in the last decade makes me question grouping any decade of music together. The hits from 2010 versus 2019 are not similar in style at all, and I imagine this had to be true for 1980 versus 1989 too. I wonder what the music of the 2010’s will be generalized to in years to come.

That’s all I have for now (I say as though that whole essay was in any way short or concise), but I really do want to keep up with this blog. I know it probably doesn’t have many readers, maybe even only Mr. Durham (hi Mr. Durham!), but that honestly makes me inclined to be more open on here than I otherwise would. I think blogging will really help me through my experience as a college freshman during the pandemic. If anyone made it this far, thank you! I hope you are doing well 🙂

What is your childhood favorite song? Do you have a specific memory of what made it your favorite song? Has it changed? How did people react when you sang it? (asked by Maggie St. John)

I had quite a few songs that I really, really loved as a kid. The first one to come to mind is Misery by Maroon 5. Maroon 5 was my “favorite band” for this song alone (I liked a lot of their other stuff, but definitely only called them my favorite because I loved this song so much), and I have so many memories of it coming on in the radio or in public. One time, it came on in the car on the way home from the pool, and I ran into my house and turned on my sister and I’s pink Disney radio to tune in and finish the song. I also remember watching the music video for it with my friends, and my innocent mind had no idea what anything in the song or video meant. I do remember the surprised reactions of parents when we’d watch it though, their faces communicating “They shouldn’t be watching this, right? Should we do something about this? They DEFINITELY shouldn’t be watching this.”

Another song that comes to mind would be “Suddenly I See” by KT Tunstall. I actually disliked this song when I was little. My childhood best friend, Anna, had 3 sisters, and my sister and I became very good friends with them all. Our families became close as a result, and we’d always go to the zoo, museum, mall, pool, or wherever together. The oldest daughter of theirs LOVED this song a little too much, so any time she had the chance, she would play it. I wouldn’t have disliked the song had I not had to hear it so often, but now, after a very long and needed break from hearing it, it brings back a whole flood of really great memories and nostalgia, so it’s definitely one of the songs that just screams “childhood” to me.

My dad made a whole CD we’d listen to on long roadtrips, which unfortunately had only 16 songs or so on it. There were a few songs that I (almost) never got tired of hearing though, including “You Sexy Thing” by Hot Chocolate, “Mr. Blue Sky” by ELO, “Everybody Got Their Something” by Nikka Costa, “Jungle Boogie” by Kool & the Gang, “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor, and “Still the One” by Orleans. There are good and bad memories associated with these feel-good songs, because our roadtrips were always very hot and cold, no in-between.

At the end of the day, do you find that you’re more proud of what you’ve accomplished or disappointed in what you’ve left for tomorrow? Does our society cut ourselves enough slack? Why do you think we end up so engrossed in workaholism?

I find it terribly ironic that I wrote my prompt on society being too busy and overworked, little did I know that in a couple of short weeks we’d go from never taking a break to not really having any other choice. I’ll try and respond from both perspectives. Back when we all led our normal lives, I always found that I was disappointed in the one thing I missed even if I checked off 10 other things on a to do list. It is so easy to focus on the negative when you grow to have extremely high expectations for yourself, which I feel like a lot of people experience. This is a silly thing to complain about, and I don’t mean to act like it’s a terribly negative thing. My grades have gotten higher and higher throughout high school, but instead of just being proud of the work I’ve put in paying off, I just let that become the new standard and get extremely stressed when they start to dip from that standard. I am very talented at picking out the things I missed or just not meeting my own personal standards even when I am accomplishing a lot in a day. I think that as a society, we were terrible at cutting ourselves slack, and that we’ve grown so competitive and focused on making money to support ourselves, our families, and our retirements/futures, that we forget to also prioritize downtime. Now that Corona has taken over all of our lives, I feel like some people have let their standards lower (rightfully so), and been more okay with being less productive. For me, I have definitely fallen off my old routine in every aspect of my life, but my mental standards for what I need to have done to count a day as successful/productive have not changed, which has taken a toll. It spirals very easily for me, and I just end up feeling a lot of hatred towards myself when I’m not getting anything done.

Going off of that, I’ve REALLY fallen off my game this week. Today (Friday! 8 PM!) is the first day I’ve been able to bring myself to do any schoolwork all week, and it feels terrible to be so behind, even if my grades can’t be affected by it. I’ve been weighing my options, and I think the best option may be to just cut my losses for this week and try and do better in the future, because I think if I cram to get absolutely everything I missed in this week I’ll overwork myself and feel even less motivated to keep going. It’s really difficult to do, but I want to try and just forgive myself for one bad week and keep going. A lot of stuff happened and I just couldn’t get everything done for the week, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t do better next week or that the rest of the work I’ve done this school year/in quarantine is invalidated. My dog got hit by a car(he is okay, thankfully), the fighting among my family members has escalated, I just broke up with a guy I’d been seeing casually for a bit, it’s just all around been a very difficult week on top of the general stresses and sadness of quarantine. I have hope that things will get better though. I really need to get on my Ohio State orientation and everything too, yikes am I behind.

I discovered this song a few months ago, but kind of forgot about it until the start of quarantine. Its lyrics have recently became very relatable, with lines such as “So you closed your eyes and dreamt your heart to a safer place and smiled for a while,” and “You’re always sayin’ that it’s all going better. Well I’ve seen you, and it needs to.” I feel like the singer is torn between wallowing in his sadness and loneliness and also criticizing himself for doing so, which I feel like I have gone back and forth between as well in the past few weeks. The layering of the brass instruments reminds me of a busy, gloomy day in NYC traffic, where most people are trudging along about their daily lives and wishing so badly to break from the same routine. Now, we all look back on our busier days as hypocrites, wishing more than anything that we could return to the lives we led before. “Listen to yourself, the king of hypocrites.” We all know the true meaning of “Be careful what you wish for.”

This song reminisces on Joel’s days living in California as he prepares to move back home to New York. He talks about the hustle and bustle of the life there, and while it was fun with an immature sort of charm, it definitely wasn’t meant to be permanent. This has a little less to do with quarantine and more the fact that all of the seniors are now transitioning away from our relatively carefree teenage years into our first real taste of adulthood in college or whatever post-high school plans we have. There’s a lot to complain about in your high school years, but overall, I feel like we all shared some good times, some of them in moments of true immaturity. Putting up a poster of Danny Devito to worship is definite immature fun, and just one small example of what we’ll be giving up in the years to come. It can also relate to quarantine in the fact that he’s talking about transitioning away from a more upbeat life to a more relaxed one, which I feel like quarantine has been an extreme version of.

The title of this one is pretty self explanatory of why it relates to quarantine. This song is pretty upbeat for a song talking about being at rock bottom and how difficult it is to push through when life feels pointless every day. I feel like we’ve all gotten a taste of the lack of motivation to do literally anything anymore, and this song captures that while also somehow motivating me to push through, which doesn’t make much sense. I think hearing someone else sing about struggling(especially in such an energetic way) makes me feel less alone in my personal struggles. This song is definitely the easiest one to dance to of the ones I’ve listed. When I listen, I can imagine a montage in a movie of a character played by like Emma Stone or someone pushing through her own time in quarantine with this song being played in the background.

I wanted to write a more positive post, so I am just gonna make a written highlight reel of my quarantine.

I’ve tried so many new recipes, and found as long as I stay focused and don’t misread things, I execute lots of them very well! I made these peanutbutter chocolate chip cookies with my best friend from Florida over Facetime, and multiple family members of mine told me they were honest-to-God the best cookies they’d ever had. I also tried the ever-growing-in-popularity whipped coffee, which is delicious! I have gotten very into avocado toast(not that that is challenging to make), and I’ve also delved into chocolate mousse, pancakes, bbq pork quesadillas, and pizookie, just to name a few. Listing these all out may worry you about possible gained weight, but I have been (or I at least think I have been) doing very well with not over-eating, eating out of boredom, or eating too many junk foods, so I should be alright.

I’ve actually been getting a lot more exercise in than before quarantine too- I just have so much more time to be doing so and it isn’t crazily hot out yet. I’ve been Facetiming my friend Abby, and we’ve been doing Youtube workouts and yoga sessions together, or we just call each other while we go for runs. I’ve also been enjoying taking my dog on ridiculously long walks, finding lots of fun new detours and just going til I think he needs to stop (as long as the weather is nice, I could just keep going and going).

It took two weeks of convincing, but my family finally got a Disney+ account! I am a big Disney fan, and having all of this stuff right on demand has been great too. Lots of nostalgic movies have made it easier to remember happier times when I am feeling down. I also enjoy knitting or coloring while watching.

Lastly, my music has been at its peak. Again, with so much more time on my hands (that I honestly wouldn’t have as much of if I hadn’t been putting off so much schoolwork), I’ve had lots of fun learning new pieces on piano, singing while playing my ukulele, practicing my clarinet, or just listening to new music on my phone. Music is such a good way to express emotion, and in my best and worst moments of quarantine emotionally/mentally, music has helped me feel what I need to feel.

I think it’s easier to focus on the bad in my blogs because I often feel more inspired to write out of my more negative moods than my positive ones. I love writing, but I just don’t feel the same inspiration for it when I’m in a great mood. I want to try and change that though by writing in both moods, and I certainly don’t want to act like my life has been all bad since quarantine’s started. It certainly has been rough, but there are always little silver linings, and those deserved a little more focus in my blogs.

The news dropped yesterday that no Missouri K-12 school would be going back for the remainder of our spring semester. Lots of fun things I’ve been looking forward to for a while aren’t happening, bigger events like Wacky Olympics(and who knows the fate of our prom or graduation ceremony), but littler things too, like senior ditch day or the posters with all of our names and where we’re going to college. We’ll be okay without them in the long run, but it sure does suck right now.

I just wish I had one non-immediate family member as a buddy through all of this. If I could just have one friend stay with us(or go over and stay with a friend and their family), this would be taking a lot less of a toll on me mentally. Everything seems to deteriorate more and more each day. Creative writing is currently my only class that I’m caught up in, and my lack of concern about this is the most concerning thing. I wish I had the drive or structure to keep up with all my schoolwork, but it is so hard to do. I learned that I can’t be on top of every last aspect of my life all at once, so it turns into a game of prioritizing what matters most. For example, say my goals in no particular order are keep a clean room, keep up my shower routine, workout every day, get a good amount of sleep, take time for my mental health, spend time with my family, work for the clubs that I’m an officer for, and stay on top of schoolwork. There’s just no way for me to do all of those things simultaneously. I was Facetiming my friend from Florida, and she said she’s either on top of absolutely everything or absolutely nothing. I don’t know which one of our two systems I’d prefer. I’m never usually at rock bottom with every single goal like she described to me, but I’m never accomplishing everything I want to either. I have to decide whether it’s more important for me to sleep for 7 hours or if I should get my 56 question physics assignment done. When I was going to school everyday, I had a better balance of sometimes prioritizing me and sometimes prioritizing school, but in quarantine with purely virtual education, anything else beats out school. Should I do 3 full-length past FRQ exams for statistics, or should I get a workout in since I haven’t left my bed all day? It’s never a hard decision.

I’m officially a Buckeye! Last night, I committed to Ohio State as a Computer Science and Engineering major. This is the first truly good news I’ve had to share in almost a month now, and it was well-needed. I lived in Ohio until I was 11, and it didn’t hit me until after committing how movie-esque and full circle this is for me. I have reached out to old best friends I haven’t spoken to in years because I found out we’ll now be going to the same college(whaaat?!), and as a result my mom ended up reaching out to old friends of hers(my friends’ parents), which makes me teary-eyed because I know she’s felt especially lonely during this quarantine and doesn’t have a lot of people in the area to talk to. After committing, I was initially just nervous! To be honest, I haven’t even seen the campus in person, and now because of everyone’s favorite virus, I wouldn’t have had a chance to see it before committing anyway. I’ve done my research, but it still felt like a shot in the dark. But reaching out to people I never realized I’d have the opportunity to see again and already hearing about things like a job offer(a real adult job in computer science?! howww?), dorm rooms, football games, etc. has made me more excited than I thought I could be for college, so most of my nerves surrounding that have been replaced with excitement butterflies.

This whole pandemic has been one of the most challenging periods of my life, but this little bit of news has helped a little. I am still falling behind in classes, and I think that my lack of sleep may be a large cause of that. I’m not recklessly staying up to watch TV or anything, I just can’t sleep anymore. I’ve been trying to get good exercise during the day and set up a nighttime routine, but not much works, especially when an assignment comes up due at midnight. Last night I turned my physics packet just after 4 AM when it was due at 11:59, and I just tagged on a little “I’m sorry this is late, took longer than anticipated” note because I do genuinely feel bad. I can’t imagine being a teacher through this, especially with the new grading policy. How are you supposed to encourage students to want to learn with practically no true incentive for them to try? Grades can’t drop, we aren’t physically at school, I know that a lot of my classmates in general have been making jokes that summer break has started already, and I just feel bad that the teachers are gonna have to try and still pull lessons, assignments, and activities together when so many students have already checked out for the year. Although I’m sure there are teachers out there who have also checked out for the year, so I guess it’s just an all-around unfortunate situation.

This post has been my most positive in a while, and it still involves a decent amount of negativity I think, so maybe I’ll aim to try and write an only-positive blog post sometime soon. I hope anyone/everyone reading this is holding up okay.

I’ve been killing myself for three or four days now trying to get all of schoolwork done for the week. One fun assignment was for my band class: we were supposed to record 5-10 minutes of us practicing every day and then submit all the videos at the end of the week. I did not do any of these until Friday evening, but it was actually fun to do all of the outfit/hair/lighting/location changes to get 5 “days” in. I do feel guilty about lying, but I plan on actually doing the assignment in the many weeks to come, so I’m trying to not let myself feel too bad.

I am getting very close to being caught up again in my AP Physics C and AP Stats classes, but they sure are major pains in the butt. I’ve watched several hours worth of lectures to take notes over already, and done many assignments online and out of the books. To be fully on top of it, I still have a packet and book notes for physics and some book work problems for statistics, but I am feeling good about getting them done. I’m even gonna take a crack at the Telegram assignment today! I just hope this productivity wave doesn’t end too soon, I need to not fall as behind as I was this week again.

I was expecting a lot more tension in my relationships with my family members, but I’ve noticed that they’re all struggling way more to get along with each other than with me. I think I have developed a very strong ability to know when to bite my tongue growing up, and that the rest of them don’t have that skill, which might be the reason behind that. My parents have been arguing nearly non-stop, and there have been many arguments between my siblings. I’ve really appreciated that I haven’t been a part of any, but sometimes it feels like a matter of time before I say something regrettable that starts something, and it still isn’t pleasant to witness all these altercations around me. I really can’t wait for the next time I can get out of the house, whether I’m picking up some more groceries or some take out dinner for my family, I can’t wait for another drive by myself. Honestly, I might just drive around for fun, even if it’s a waste of gas. Gas prices are down now(which is the only good thing that seems to have happened in the past month), and I haven’t been using gas for anything else, so I think I’m okay with using a little just for a trip around town. I miss school a lot! I’ll write more soon.

I attempted to catch up on all of my schoolwork once again today, which ended in a bit of a breakdown, but also a realization. I have no proper workspace at my home, and working from my bed wasn’t cutting it like it sometimes did for homework. I tried to set up a little area for myself in the typically unused living room that’s separated from the rest of the house by two sets of French doors. It’s always been “my” space, no one else in my family cares to go in there with the lack of television or other form of entertainment, but I just love the daylight it lets in and the piano. Having a separate room for “work” than my bedroom(now designated for downtime) solves the issue of not feeling the productive, time-to-work mindset, and also the issue of accidentally associating my room with the stresses of school. However, I still am unable to really focus, and today it hit me that the biggest cause of that is the lack of quiet from the rest of my family. I live in a family of 6, and I am the second youngest, meaning we have a 17-year-old, 18-year-old, 20-year-old, and 21-year-old along with our parents all in tight quarters(sometimes it really just feels like I just have 5 full-grown roommates who bother me a lot of the time). My dad is a night owl and my mom is an early bird, so I’m not exaggerating when I say that from 7 in the morning to sometimes as late as 3 AM, you can hear at least one person stirring. From people blasting the television to watch their quarantine movies to my dad spontaneously deciding to reorganize the kitchen to my brother’s necessity for a soundtrack with bass so heavy that the whole house shakes for his workouts and post-workout showers, there is always noise in the house, and it’s starting to really drive me insane trying to do schoolwork with its incessant rumble. I’m definitely more sensitive to sounds than most(and this gets exponentially worse when I’m trying to focus on work), but I think anyone in my shoes would be nearly as frustrated as I am about the whole thing. My solution to this issue used to be to go to the library or Bread Co., but those are no longer options for obvious reasons. I’d go to my car or the park, but since everything is virtual now, I am totally dependent on our crappy Wi-Fi to get most of my work done, and stuck inside to do so. I wish I could set up a hot spot with my phone, but our data plan doesn’t allow for that. My usual solution to the noise is to put in earbuds and blast my own music, but I’m equally as unable to focus with that, and it often just feels like I’m adding to the noise instead of covering up the bothersome noises with more pleasant ones. I wish there was a way for me to obtain noise-canceling headphones, but when Amazon goes back to shipping regularly or when Best Buy opens back up, I think that would be a good investment for me. I’ve really tried a lot of different solutions, but nothing has worked and I’m just left feeling so flustered and frustrated. That alone isn’t what caused my breakdown today- it was the realization that this would continue to be a problem for me for the entirety of April(I suppose right now school is only canceled through the 22nd, but I’d be very surprised if we went back before May). I’ve learned that I just don’t do well with the lack of structure of virtual school, and I just have a bad feeling that even if my grades pull through this okay, I’m not taking nearly as much away from school every day, and despite the fact that I feel like I’ll be learning less, it’s somehow more frustrating and stressful than it used to be going in person. It’s crazy what I’d give to be able to wake up at 6:30 AM to go to my physics zero hour in the morning again, just to return to the schedule we used to have. There were so many aspects of school that I used to just dread, and now I long for them with this fear that I’ll never experience them again with it being my last semester of school. My recent blog posts have all been quite negative, but it’s been cathartic for me to write everything I’ve been feeling down somewhere at least. I’m sorry to anyone who’s read this far.